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Introducing the Ars Technica Reader for iPad

The Ars Technica Reader for iPad is now officially available. It's free (as in …

We're pleased to announce the official availability of the Ars Technica Reader for iPad, made possible in partnership with IBM. We thank IBM for supporting the Reader for iPad, and we hope you will enjoy version 1.0. In the rest of this column, we'll tell you about the app, explain some choices we made, and ask you to help spread the Ars goodness.

Why tablets?

You can already read Ars on your iPad via Safari, so why bake an iPad version? First, we think tablets are very cool and afford some innovative design choices. Our philosophy towards tablets is simple: they aren't desktop computers, and they aren't print magazines, so we needed to focus on what they do well, and avoid trying to make tablets into something they're not. The Ars Technica Reader for iPad is all about creating an intrusion-free reading experience that is clean, straightforward, and not overdesigned. The application was designed to be speedy, nimble, and relatively fast to sync.

Second, we believe that tablets are here to stay. While we've been cutting our teeth with the iPad, plans are already in the works for an Android version. Mobile visitors to Ars are generating over 2 million pageviews per month, coming from both tablets and phones (our mobile site, m.arstechnica.com/m.arst.ch, is great for phones). This is something we love, and we want to encourage it.

Identifying a single killer feature for our Reader is not easy. Based on feedback from our readers, we built the Reader to synchronize not only recent Ars content, but also your favorite content for offline reading. Heading to the dentist office where there is no WiFi? Sync up and read away. Been meaning to catch up on an epic review from last month? Flag it as a favorite, and sync it.

Mobility isn't the only draw. The app features a streamlined, tablet-based browsing experience. It follows the spirit of our Premier website design: no ads in or next to the content, minimal chrome, and content is front and center, where it should be. Here's what it looks like:

Thanks to the sponsorship with IBM, the application itself is free and it's available now in Apple's App Store. Check it out, and please let us know what you think. We'd also greatly appreciate some positive reviews in the App Store. Help spread the love for Ars Technica!

The Reader does have minimal ads, but if you are a Premier Subscriber you can log in to get the ad-free experience. Even if you don't have an Ars Technica account, you can start up a trial account with a single click and the ad-supported experience, then upgrade to a Premier account at any time.

Why the iPad?

It should be no surprise that the iPad is the most popular tablet on Ars—there is so little competition at this time. While we have plans to support other tablets in the future, we decided that version 1.0 was going to be aimed at the iPad, and the WiFi-only version at that. (3G users can, of course, use the app.) We expected that there were throngs of WiFi users wanting to take Ars with them on a plane, in a car, on a bus, or elsewhere where they have no WiFi or 3G service.

We built the application with future platforms in mind. Our application is 99 percent written using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript (technically CoffeeScript compiled into JavaScript). Our application targets the WebKit browser and will work anywhere that engine is deployed. That means we can easily port this application to future Android tablets, the upcoming RIM Playbook, and any other platform for which we see significant demand. And, if we need to, we always have the option to liberate the app from Apple's App Store and deploy it fully on the Web.

The client itself is deployed in a PhoneGap iPad application wrapper. This is not much more than a Xcode project with JavaScript hooks into various parts of the iOS APIs. PhoneGap has similar wrappers that implement the same API on other platforms (Android, Blackberry, Palm, Symbian, and WinMo). Not all of these are at the same level of quality as the iOS and Android versions, but we hope they will be soon.

The bulk of the application, as mentioned, is nothing but HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The JavaScript is written in a language called CoffeeScript, which has a Ruby-like syntax and makes using the Good Parts™ of JavaScript much easier. The CSS is compiled down to JavaScript code that is shipped with the application.

CoffeeScript is much easier on the eyes, and makes it easier to write good JS.

One of the most liberating parts of developing this application was the prospect of targeting a single browser engine: very recent versions of Webkit. This is great because you can completely do away with JavaScript frameworks like Prototype and jQuery that spend most of their time compensating for quirks and incompatibilities between a multitude of runtimes. You can really get away with writing your own micro-framework to make redundant operations like adding event listeners, doing animations, and accessing methods like document.getElementById and document.querySelectorAll—as we did—or you can piggyback off the work of giants and use something off-the-shelf like Zepto by Thomas Fuchs.

The user interface is very simple HTML and CSS. This is great, because the Webkit team has implemented a ton of neat stuff like animations, transforms, transitions, advanced CSS3 rules like text and box shadows, gradients, and the canvas tag. They make it easier than ever to meet our designer's exacting standards and to build fast, beautiful applications without resorting to weird tricks and hacks.

What makes all of this even more exciting is that, on many mobile platforms—and certainly on the iPad and iPhone—many of these animations and tranforms can be hardware-accelerated, which results in a very native experience in a simple Web application.

To power the back-end of the application, we developed a back-end API powered by Rails and MongoDB—a speedy document-oriented database that fit our use case nearly perfectly. This gives us a ton of flexibility in how we can deliver Ars content to you. Right now, we deliver just about everything (no Etc. posts) to the iPad but, in the future, we can slice and dice our content based on tags, categories, authors, and more, to give each user of our mobile applications a customized experience.

What's even cooler is that this API has laid some really important groundwork for features that have already reached the website in the form of better formatted posts, better formatting in our Kindle and RSS feeds, and better article composition options for authors, all of which make posts more uniform. The API and its underlying service may also help us bring features like customized RSS feeds, customized front page composition, and a much improved site search engine in the future.

Developers, there's the future possibility we could open this API up to people who want to do interesting things with it. Please let us know if you think you would like to do interesting projects using our data!

What's next and how you can help (Updated)

The application we've released into the wild today is missing a lot of features. That is by design, for several reasons. We had lot of great ideas like adding a bookmarking feature to the website that would sync individual articles to your tablet, enabling syncing images for offline viewing, adding the ability to view articles in landscape format, allowing reading and contributing to comments, letting users customize the types of content to be delivered, and lots more.

What we didn't want to do, however, is to run down a lot of roads only to discover that they were dead-ends as far as our readership is concerned. We want to implement features that our readers actually want, so we're counting on you to let us know what you'd like to see in the application.

And for those of you without iPads, please contribute as well. All the updates we make here will automatically be available on any other platforms we decide to support. Also let us know if we should be looking at any particular platform or device; we want to know where we should focus our attention in the future. This application is for our readers, so we really hope to hear your feedback about where we should take it.

Please leave your feedback in the comments of this post, or if you'd like to contact us directly, shoot us an e-mail at civis@arstechnica.com.

Update! We've had some frequently asked questions, so here are some answers!

Q: Why is $flaw ruining my day? A: We tested the app internally, and Apple also tested it. Still, we know there will be bugs and jitters and various other things. Please report flaws here or to civis@ars, and give us some time to address them before condemning us or leaving a scathing review.

Q: Any plans for an iPhone/iPod Touch version of the app? A: No, not at this time. We really are focusing on the tablet experience. We may look at phones again (m.arstechnica.com, launched about a year ago, was our first effort for phones) in the future, though, and love your feedback!

Q: No landscape? A: That’s in the next version. We wanted to get something out for your review asap. Also, we chose portrait first because that’s what the stats say most people read in.

Q: Why an App for a tablet? A: A browser is still a point-and-click interface that’s run on a PC of some sort, most of the time. We believe that the tablet reading experience is different, and wanted to experiment. Most of the Ars staff that have tablets are converts to tablet-based reading.

Yeah I have a suggestion. After you get it tweaked how you like, show it to your print brothers at Conde Naste, who as a group have rolled over and played dead for their Adobe masters for their garden-walled iPad bloatware.

And if what you have isn't yet suitable for print publications please consider making extensible for that. Conde should be paying you guys for projects like this, thereby helping to literally change the publishing world in a positive way---not Adobe.

Feedback - sounds like a interesting way to experience Ars. I've yet to get an iPad, but would love to see this ported to iPhone as well. As for the mobile site, as a premier subscriber, I'd love to get a lot of the premier features ported over to the mobile version (make logging in easier/cleaner for one) and having the forums easy to read/access/post to with minimal zooming and un-zooming would be nice too.

The forums are the one thing I find I miss when hitting the site on my iPhone.

Why an app? I'd be interested in knowing if most if not all of what this app gives you couldn't have also been presented via a web browser. An app is limited to a specific device, and (in Apple's case) requires approval before release and upgrades. A web app gives you instant rollouts, cross-device compatibility, but I guess doesn't provide any promotional prospects compared to a real "app" sitting in the app store. Anyway, regardless - looks promising. I'll give it a whirl on my iPad later. Ars has always provided a great mobile experience when viewed via my nexus and I expect this to be pretty slick.

The next time someone says 'the desktop computer' or 'the application' is dead - take a LONG look at this.

Dynamo Hum has a very valid question - why does this app exist when it's really just a webscraper. Why couldn't the original webpages be adjusted to provide this functionality without needing a special app that's mostly just a webbrowser?

When you have the answer, you'll see why apps and full OSes aren't going anywhere and why "the Cloud" doesn't solve everything.

Why an app? I'd be interested in knowing if most if not all of what this app gives you couldn't have also been presented via a web browser. An app is limited to a specific device, and (in Apple's case) requires approval before release and upgrades. A web app gives you instant rollouts, cross-device compatibility, but I guess doesn't provide any promotional prospects compared to a real "app" sitting in the app store. Anyway, regardless - looks promising. I'll give it a whirl on my iPad later. Ars has always provided a great mobile experience when viewed via my nexus and I expect this to be pretty slick.

Having used some apps for websites I like, I think Apps in general provide a much better reading experience. A Web browser is a very generic tool. An app for reading New York Times or Time Magazine e.g. can be tailored around magazine reading. You can store past issues locally on your device and browse them. The interface doesn't have to be cluttered with menu entries like: File, Edit, View, History, Tools etc which makes little sense in a magazine reading context.

An example is using google's wave client. I tried to right click on some icons expecting useful operations related to that particular kind of object. But instead I get things like "show source code" and "bookmark this page". That is the problem right there. The interface of the webbrowser is getting in the way of the interface for the application you are using. I believe in the Web but I don't believe in everything going through the webbrowser. That has already been taken way too far.

Why an app? I'd be interested in knowing if most if not all of what this app gives you couldn't have also been presented via a web browser.

They answered this question in the article above....

Quote:

The application was designed to be speedy, nimble, and relatively fast to sync.

Quote:

We expected that there were throngs of WiFi users wanting to take Ars with them on a plane, in a car, on a bus, or elsewhere where they have no WiFi or 3G service.

Quote:

Based on feedback from our readers, we built the Reader to synchronize not only recent Ars content, but also your favorite content for offline reading.

Quote:

We had lot of great ideas like adding a bookmarking feature to the website that would sync individual articles to your tablet, enabling syncing images for offline viewing, adding the ability to view articles in landscape format, allowing reading and contributing to comments, letting users customize the types of content to be delivered, and lots more.

Why an app? I'd be interested in knowing if most if not all of what this app gives you couldn't have also been presented via a web browser.

They answered this question in the article above....

Quote:

The application was designed to be speedy, nimble, and relatively fast to sync.

Quote:

We expected that there were throngs of WiFi users wanting to take Ars with them on a plane, in a car, on a bus, or elsewhere where they have no WiFi or 3G service.

Quote:

Based on feedback from our readers, we built the Reader to synchronize not only recent Ars content, but also your favorite content for offline reading.

Quote:

We had lot of great ideas like adding a bookmarking feature to the website that would sync individual articles to your tablet, enabling syncing images for offline viewing, adding the ability to view articles in landscape format, allowing reading and contributing to comments, letting users customize the types of content to be delivered, and lots more.

Doesn't anybody read?

That made me laugh! Of course they don't read, it's more fun to skip to the comments and moan/rant/complain/troll etc.

I'm finding the performance of the app to be, well, crappy. There's a lot of render lag, tapping-and-waiting, and juddering in the animations when they do happen. Look, I more than many understand the joys and simplicity of developing with simplifying frameworks, but the user experience you're providing just isn't comparable to a native app. It's really frustrating to use your "app" when compared to something like Reeder.

Your app is, sadly, a great demonstration that cross-platform frameworks, when used improperly, benefit only the developer -- at great expense to the user. And Ars, of all sites, should know that Apple's success is rooted in the reverse: enormous effort behind the scenes (at any cost to developers) to make the user experience as perfect as possible.

I think it would be beneficial to have something akin to the homepage of Ars where you can just scroll through the stories or see the main headlines, because the current layout makes it quite laborious to read the older stories.

And would it be possible to implement some sort of landscape view?Perhaps with the stories on the side as a panel (like how it is in Mail etc)

I currently feel the app is overly simplified.

That's my take on the app.

Nonetheless, it's great, and the ability to view offline is good as well.

Tried it briefly. Very fast sync over 3G (especially around here, the network slows to a crawl around here during the day, too many highly paid professionals with smart phones) - that was nice. Initial scroll was "stuck" it would only scroll so far and no further even though the scroll bar showed at least 66% of the article left. After just a couple of seconds it would scroll all the way - fast and smooth. I expect this is just something to do with loading the article.

I second the call for a landscape option and I'd like a better way to browse the articles - the little browser pane at the bottom with three articles shown at the bottom is a little limiting for my tastes and the popup menu is also limited for browsing. Something like the home page would be great for skimming through the recent articles.

Overall, very nice for a v1.0 app. While, I've been using iCab on the iPad for ArsTechnica - this certainly seems like a great option for the front page (I do, however, spend most of my time in the forums).

One app. I pay a sub ("join a site" - keeps Apple happier), and get content every month/day/whatever.

I returned my iPad yesterday, as I found it way too heavy, and way to expensive to fit into the tiny niche between my MBP and iPhone4.... and there is _no_way_ I'm taking a iPad out on the tube.... (not for security reasons - more 'cos I dont want to look like a w**ker)

If you open the iPad version a little, maybe someone else can do the iPhone part...? or not, I guess, as then they could just remove the ads...

Immediate comments: your fake scroll view is a real distraction. The bounce back when you scroll too far is obviously different from the rest of the OS and occasionally takes a moment to kick in. Attempting to pinch zoom causes it to freak out.

Reinventing the wheel and getting it wrong is not an attractive feature.

So far it looks pretty cool. A little slow at times, but perhaps it's due to the initial rush of users? I do have a couple things:

1 - Upon logging in this morning via the app I got an ad - and I then realized my Premier Subscription ended at the stroke of midnight last month (Oct). I then re-upped my subscription but I am still getting ads.

2 - Don't see any way to get to the forums from the app. That's a real bummer since I cross between both kinds of content frequently. Which means I will be using my homepage bookmark instead of this app for now. Even the iPhone version has a way to go to the "full site," but even that is pretty annoying. The more seamless the better.

No thanks. I have a light laptop and a browser. That does the job just fine.

Why would you not have an ipad? Like all the cool people running around with it. Only thing that could improve this app is taking money for it so that people can really feel the quality of it. After all if it's for free it's not a true Apple inspired app.

My instapaper account has been used almost exclusively for Ars content, but this is better. Looking forward to seeing some tweaks and bookmarking functionality. I'm definitely your target audience and I thank you.

- no front page to see most news at once : bad. You should allow to go fullscreen with the news view- no copy/paste : you should be ashamed. Despicable. - no zoom on text ! Just a tiny a A menu ?! : my god it's not a book ! Just news- just a glorified simplistic website - sync is great , you could add that to your REAL website thanks to safari and firefox 4 functionnalities.

The point is : you are no better than apple to create a good UI to browse.

Too bad for the online sync, I'll still use the real website with safari.

As mentioned before by other people (and me to an extent), could you make it more seamless with the OS, tweaking the minor settings and effects like scrolling and pinching.

It might seem a bit trivial and overly aesthetic orientated, but the settings button on the top left doesn't contain anything else except for a logout button, and maybe it would be better if you could just make a button that says "Logout" rather than creating a double layer of buttons to go through.

On the bright side, after scrolling through articles offline, the amount of content stored locally is good, enough for readers to catch up anything they haven't read on.

I would totally use this if I had an iPad. In fact, this makes me want to buy an iPad. I was holding out for Gen2 of the iPad... but given all the goodies (and my wife's Angry Birds addiction) I don't know if I'll last past December.

Why an app? I'd be interested in knowing if most if not all of what this app gives you couldn't have also been presented via a web browser. An app is limited to a specific device, and (in Apple's case) requires approval before release and upgrades. A web app gives you instant rollouts, cross-device compatibility, but I guess doesn't provide any promotional prospects compared to a real "app" sitting in the app store. [...]

This. Other than being in the "you're not cool unless you have an app" club, an iPad app gives the iPad user a marginally better experience than what can be achieved with similar effort via the browser, and users of all other devices of course get nothing. Still, if it keeps the Ars devs out of trouble...

First blush. Clicked on a story. It didn't load, just a blank page. Tried a couple more stories and same result. I'll try it again later but so far all the apps I've tried that use a web site for their content look janky compared to the actual site. The Wired app is terrible, for example.Sorry guys. I will keep checking to see if it improves 'cause I love the content on Ars Technica and have a WiFi only iPad.

It might seem a bit trivial and overly aesthetic orientated, but the settings button on the top left doesn't contain anything else except for a logout button, and maybe it would be better if you could just make a button that says "Logout" rather than creating a double layer of buttons to go through.

Aesthetics are not trivial! They make the experience on the iPad (or any tablet really.)

I do like Ars' approach on this; not trying to do too much and then see what people want given what's there. As long as they stick with it short-term it will turn into something really slick (and there's no indication they won't given past performance.)

But how much of this could be done with HTML5? (and thus be applicable to other mobile devices) Tablets are going to be big and the iPad is the entire market right now, but it won't be forever. Again; I don't know how much of this would be possible in HTML5 (or even Apple's implementation) but it would be nice.

Update: You guys have asked some great questions, and here are our answers so far:

Why is $flaw ruining my day? We tested the app internally, and Apple also tested it. Still, we know there will be bugs and jitters and various other things. Please report flaws here or to civis@ars, and give us some time to address them before condemning us.

Any plans for an iPhone/iPod Touch version of the app? No, not at this time. We really are focusing on the tablet experience. We may look at phones again (m.arstechnica.com, launch about a year ago, was our first effort for phones) in the future.

No landscape? That’s in the next version. We wanted to get something out for your review asap. Also, we chose portrait first because that’s what the stats say most people read in.

Why an app? I'd be interested in knowing if most if not all of what this app gives you couldn't have also been presented via a web browser. You could probably do 90% of this in a browser, but a browser is still a point-and-click interface that’s run on a PC of some sort, most of the time. We believe that the tablet reading experience is different, and wanted to experiment. Most of the Ars staff that have tablets are converts to tablet-based reading.

deckeda wrote:

And if what you have isn't yet suitable for print publications please consider making extensible for that. Conde should be paying you guys for projects like this, thereby helping to literally change the publishing world in a positive way---not Adobe.

I returned my iPad yesterday, as I found it way too heavy, and way to expensive to fit into the tiny niche between my MBP and iPhone4.... and there is _no_way_ I'm taking a iPad out on the tube.... (not for security reasons - more 'cos I dont want to look like a w**ker)

I regularly use an iPad on the Tube. I don't see how a certain device makes one a "wanker". Tons of people use different devices on the Tube. They all seem fine to me.

And I certainly look forward to reading Ars on the Tube now... Its a great App...!

I had to come back to the web interface to leave this comment. Also no social sharing options.

But otherwise good. I didn't have any scroll lag or anything like that but my ipad isn't on iOS 3.2 either...

I'm a big fan of phonegap and the ability to create multi platform apps. Considering good iPhone app developers charge around $150/hr, being able to replicae them (mostly) with in-house web developers is a huge plus.

Why an app? I'd be interested in knowing if most if not all of what this app gives you couldn't have also been presented via a web browser.

They answered this question in the article above....

Quote:

The application was designed to be speedy, nimble, and relatively fast to sync.

Quote:

We expected that there were throngs of WiFi users wanting to take Ars with them on a plane, in a car, on a bus, or elsewhere where they have no WiFi or 3G service.

Quote:

Based on feedback from our readers, we built the Reader to synchronize not only recent Ars content, but also your favorite content for offline reading.

Quote:

We had lot of great ideas like adding a bookmarking feature to the website that would sync individual articles to your tablet, enabling syncing images for offline viewing, adding the ability to view articles in landscape format, allowing reading and contributing to comments, letting users customize the types of content to be delivered, and lots more.

Doesn't anybody read?

That made me laugh! Of course they don't read, it's more fun to skip to the comments and moan/rant/complain/troll etc.

Why do you laugh? Are you not aware of what's achievable in HTML5? Both Android and iOS have HTML5 capable browsers. HTML5 has handy features like offline storage. Not saying it would have been easy as I'm not a web developer and HTML5 is a moving target, but I suspect it wouldn't be a huge challenge, and I'd personally have found it a much more progressive and educational approach by Ars than yet another one trick pony app that's essentially an RSS reader/screenscraper.

I will say that I'm quite surprised at the use of CoffeeScript. I had only ever heard about it in cursory terms, and so I was quite surprised to learn that it was usable in a production-level setting! That's pretty fantastic as I love the work it does to cut down on Javascript's more verbose and awkward elements.

Did you guys consider other javascript libraries/cross-compilers like Google Closure or was it too bloated, and you just wanted javascript with some syntactic sugar?

EDIT: To be honest, the whole CoffeeScript thing is what I find most interesting about this. Oh... nice app, too!